In a study by Kutner, M. et al. Results From the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy, 2006, incorporated by reference as if fully set forth herein, it was shown that only 12 percent of the more than 19,000 adults surveyed demonstrated what is considered to be Proficient health literacy. This means that 9 out 10 people could not use medical information properly, resulting in incorrect usage of medication, wrong preparation before procedures, misbehavior post-discharge, etc. resulting in poor outcomes. Vernon, J. et al. Low Health Literacy: Implications for National Health Policy, 2007, incorporated by reference as if fully set forth herein, estimated the cost of low health literacy to the U.S. economy in the range of $106 billion to $238 billion annually.
Davis, T. et al. Literacy and Misunderstanding Prescription Drug Labels, 2006, incorporated by reference as if fully set forth herein, found that only 34.7% of patients with low literacy could demonstrate the number of pills to be taken daily for the instruction “Take two tablets by mouth twice daily”. Thus the use of written information as the main source of medication counseling for patients is problematic for many. Clearly a need exists to tailor medical instructions to the needs of the specific patient and present it in a way that they will find engaging and memorable.
Personalized instructional videos could provide a potential solution to the above issue and constructing video clips, which are short segments of video data, typically lasting from 30 seconds to 5 minutes or longer, is known in the art. However, currently such construction requires manual intervention, such that personalization of such clips is cost prohibitive. Also, performing this in real-time and on-demand is expensive and currently impossible with low-end hardware. For example, an instructional video clip is usually not personalized to address a specific user, or even the specific needs of a specific user, simply because it is too expensive to do so.
Indeed, personalized on-demand video could find usage in a range of non-medical fields such as advertising, instruction or general informational videos, but the problems described above, such as the time for manual personalization, and the cost of high-end hardware, generally prevents such applications.